Abstract
THE YEARS THAT had seen Korean women and men discover Christian teachings in Japan were also those during which the position of Christianity had grown increasingly fraught there. By the end of 1614, the Tokugawa leadership had proscribed the Christian faith, issuing a decree to expel missionaries and their local supporters, sending some Christians into hiding in Japan and others to new lands. Significant political changes in the years following, including the death of the military dictator Tokugawa Ieyasu, the abdication of his successor, Hidetada, and the rise to power of Iemitsu, did not alter the trajectory of intensification of state- sanctioned violence against Christians. However, in the Jesuit archive as well as in wider Catholic textual traditions, violence offered new forms of spiritual expression for evangelized Koreans, just as it did for Kirishitans and Society men. Chief among these forms, Christian authors proposed, was the opportunity to participate in the most exclusive of communities, that of the Christian martyrs. Suffering as Christians could be understood as spiritually, and personally, productive. This chapter explores how authors conceptualized the gendered nature of the violence against the Christian community in Japan, an experience that had different contours for Korean- born women and men, and offered distinct meanings for expression of their faith identities and for those who beheld it, as eyewitnesses, authors, and readers.